From Stenotype to Tintype: C.D. Wright’s Technologies of “Type”

Jennie Berner (bio)
University of Illinois, Chicago
jennieberner@hotmail.com

Abstract

 C.D. Wright’s engagement with documentary technology—stenography in Deepstep Come Shining and tintype photography in One Big Self—reveals a contradictory impulse in her poetry: to document individualized data while abstracting this data into “type.” Wright uses this contradiction to underline the incommensurability of two literary discourses in Deepstep Come Shining (documentary and lyrical), and of two political ones in One Big Self (neoliberal and materialist). Against the mischaracterization of Deepstep Come Shining as a hybrid documentary-lyrical text, this essay argues that it embodies a renewed commitment to medium specificity; and against the mischaracterization of One Big Self as a testament to the liberating power of self-expression, it argues that the poem shifts attention away from prisoners’ identities and toward material forms of subjugation.
 
C.D. Wright’s book-length poem, Deepstep Come Shining (1998), includes several facsimiles of long, thin strips of old stenotype paper produced by Wright’s mother, who was a court reporter in Arkansas. On one level, these facsimiles underline what many critics have called the “documentary” mode of the poem, whose stenographic impulse is demonstrated by its recording of the voices and texts that Wright encountered along a road trip through the American South.¹ On another level, however, the facsimiles underline a seemingly contradictory impulse of abstracting and obscuring these same voices and texts. The facsimiles are, after all, effectively illegible; we see the wrinkles and folds that mar the letters, the smudged and bleeding ink, but not the courtroom proceedings they once were meant to relate. While certainly not illegible, the voices and texts composing the poem Deepstep Come Shining undergo a similar materialization, insofar as they are persistently fragmented, flattened, and reframed. This materialization discloses, in turn, a remarkably personal, even lyrical dimension of the poem: just as the stenotype facsimiles’ irregularities evidence the hand of Wright’s mother, so too the poem’s idiosyncrasies evidence the hand of Wright herself.
 
In this way, Deepstep Come Shining stages the convergence of two modes of discourse – documentary and lyric – that have often been deemed incompatible due to the former’s commitment to objectivity versus the latter’s commitment to subjectivity. This convergence has been a hallmark of Wright’s poetry for decades, and has located her in a tradition of poets who have undertaken similar documentary projects (William Carlos Williams in Paterson, Muriel Rukeyser in U.S. 1, and Theresa Cha in Dictee, to name a few). But unlike many documentary poems that have negotiated these two modes of discourse by disturbing the line between objectivity and subjectivity – by insisting that documents are never neutral and, conversely, that the lyric subject is always shaped by material culture – Deepstep Come Shining emphasizes and in fact exploits their incommensurability. To see Wright’s idiosyncratic hand at work in the poem is, after all, to be blind at the same time to the Southern landscapes she has so rigorously documented, just as to see those landscapes is to be blind to her idiosyncrasy. The poem, that is to say, operates according to a unique poetics of vision that allows Wright to embrace documentary and lyric without sacrificing the specificity of either mode.
 
This poetics of vision emerges again in One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003), a photo book of Louisiana prisoners that Wright produced in collaboration with the photographer Deborah Luster. This time, however, Wright’s formal benchmark is the tintype, an early photographic medium most often associated with portraiture, and what’s ultimately at stake is not so much the integrity of the lyric subject as the integrity of all the “selves” she investigates. Like Luster’s tintype-style photographs, Wright’s text simultaneously documents the identities and aspirations of individual prisoners and obscures them in order to reveal powerful abstractions of the prison-industrial complex. Wright’s engagements with these two documentary technologies, the stenotype and the tintype, reveal her ongoing interest in the transformation of highly particularized data into “type.” But whereas the stenotype serves as a figure for Deepstep Come Shining‘s attention to printed “type” and to the people who write or key it, the tintype serves as a figure for One Big Self‘s attention to sociological (and especially criminal) “types” and the institutions that administer them.
 
From this standpoint, it is not surprising that many critics have described One Big Self as a more explicitly ethical or political project than Deepstep Come Shining.² To be sure, One Big Self draws on Deepstep Come Shining‘s poetics of vision to confront a corresponding politics of vision. This politics, however, is more complex – and indeed more contentious – than most of Wright’s critics presume. In response to the prevailing claim that One Big Self offers, above all, a compassionate portrayal of prisoners’ individuality, I argue that it is precisely by obscuring and abstracting individuality that Wright achieves her political project. No matter what identities the prisoners of One Big Self perform for the viewer, they are forever subsumed, the poem suggests, by the brute reality of their incarceration. Indeed, if Deepstep Come Shining realizes the incommensurability of two modes of literary discourse (documentary and lyric), One Big Self harnesses this realization to underscore the incommensurability of two modes of political discourse: one that aims to register (and, more importantly, respect) individual interests and identities, and another that aims to evaluate and improve material conditions that exist regardless of individual interests and identities. Although Wright does not endorse one of these political discourses over the other, to her credit her project diverges from – and redresses – the standard postmodern project insofar as it divorces each discourse from the other, strategically shifting our attention away from the contents of people’s unique identities and towards various material (economic, juridical, and carceral) forms of subjugation and inequality.
 

Deepstep Come Shining’s Poetics of Vision

 
I should acknowledge at the outset that my emphasis on the stenotype in Deepstep Come Shining may seem disproportionate by some measures. The facsimiles punctuate the poem a mere four times over the course of one-hundred-plus pages and may look mainly decorative at first glance. Critics have largely ignored them, concentrating instead on the poem’s more obvious preoccupation with vision. Without a doubt, Wright reflects on a variety of visual media in the poem (painting, photography, film, etc.), and directly cites texts like Newton’s Opticks and Fry’s Vision and Design.³ I do not mean to downplay the importance of this preoccupation by highlighting the stenotype. On the contrary, I begin my discussion of Deepstep Come Shining with the poem’s treatment of vision not only to ground the subsequent discussion of the stenotype in its broader context, but moreover to argue that the stenotype can sharpen our understanding of the poem’s visual concerns.
 
Deepstep Come Shining repeatedly conceives of objects that are acutely visible, even luminous. Many objects figured in the poem emanate light: “magnolialight,” “leglight,” “lotuslight,” “cornlight,” “onionlight,” “alligatorlight,” “Formicalight.” These compounds suggest that light is inextricably tied to particular objects. While the poem acknowledges the contrary scientific claim – “It is not that we live in a world of colored objects but that surfaces reflect a certain portion of the light hitting them” (79) – it almost exclusively represents an optics of embodiment, not reflection. The many references to chlorophyll and photosynthesis, for instance, as well as to the tapeta lucida that makes some animals’ eyes shine in the dark, clearly indicate a fascination with the synthesis of light and matter. This synthesis becomes even more pronounced in the many instances of synesthesia throughout Deepstep Come Shining. One passage, for instance, describes a woman who “laid her hand on the deeply furrowed bark, groping for the area of darkest color” (67). Another quotes King Lear‘s Gloucester: “I see it feelingly” (1).
 
This fascination with embodied light recalls Roland Barthes’s famous meditation on photography, Camera Lucida, and in particular the section titled “The Luminous Rays, Color.”⁴ According to Barthes, “the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent” (80). Through the photograph, the referent transmits “radiations” to the spectator (80). In this way, he says, “a sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed” (81). It may come as no surprise, then, that Deepstep Come Shining treats photography as a technology of vision par excellence.⁵ Some lines go so far as to connect human vision with photography by way of a manufactured chemical, silver nitrate, which is not only applied “in the newborn’s eyes” (57) to prevent infection that might lead to blindness, but also used “in manufacturing photographic film” (73).
 
In fact, Wright treats photography as not only an exemplary technology of vision, but moreover as an exemplary poetics of vision. Photography, that is to say, emerges as a remarkable kind of “writing of the light” to which the poem aspires (3). This analogy, of course, is largely figurative: poems do not actually capture or radiate light. As Barthes explains, the peculiar ontology of the photograph makes it capable of transmitting the referent’s radiations in a way that a text (or, more specifically, a poem) cannot. The “photographic referent,” after all, is “not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph” (76). The photograph confirms that its referent existed in a particular place at a particular time. It is a “certificate of presence” (87). The light it gives off, in turn, physically corresponds to the light its referent gave off at the moment the photograph was taken. In this way, a photograph maintains an essentially indexical relationship with the thing it is of.⁶
 
This conception of vision as indexical comes at a cost, however: it threatens to reduce the eye to “a mere mechanical instrument” and “image-catching device,” as Deepstep Come Shining puts it (78, 73).⁷ Yet photography’s indexicality – however unattainable for poetry – is precisely what seems to appeal to Wright as a horizon for Deepstep Come Shining. The poem’s title can be read, in fact, as a reduplication of indices. “Deepstep Come Shining,” the poet repeats, encouraging Deepstep – which not only refers to a town in Georgia, but also evokes another kind of index, the footprint – to impress her with its light. Indeed, although Wright cannot achieve formally what she figures (i.e., a poem comprised of luminous objects that have autonomously imprinted themselves on her eyes and, in turn, on the page), a corresponding formal project does emerge as long as we broaden our purview to include other varieties of indexicality. The poem emerges specifically as an index of language, if not light.
 
This formal project is announced, in part, by Wright’s inclusion of the stenotype facsimiles mentioned earlier. Stenotype is a kind of shorthand machine most often used by court reporters that allows the operator to type spoken dialogue quickly, theoretically in real time. It is designed as a recording device, not a compositional tool, and as the term “operator” suggests, the individual who uses the stenotype is considered to be a part of its machinery. In short, the operator is no writer. In this light, the stenotype serves as a fitting emblem for indexicality in writing and thus plays a crucial rather than merely decorative role in the poem. The stenotype, that is to say, formalizes for the poem what photography can only figure.⁸
 
In keeping with this stenographic model, Deepstep Come Shining comprises actual voices, texts, and other media Wright encountered on a Southern road trip (many of which are listed at the end of the poem, under the heading “Stimulants, Poultices, Goads“). Some voices evoke the locale. For instance, the expression, “All around in here it used to be so pretty” (8) and the adjective “yonder” (7) hail from the South, as does the old grammar joke: “Where do you folks live at. Between the a and the t” (23, 47). At least one voice in the poem speaks in Spanish. Still others suggest a particular speaker’s occupation: the waiter’s “Are you still working on that drink” (84, 87) or the DJ’s “Don’t touch that dial” (43, 58, 96, 97). The poem even records lyrics from artists, like Bob Dylan, whom one might hear on the car radio. Advertisements for events such as fiddle contests and products like Gold Bond Medicated Powder populate the poem, as do posted rules like “no-shoe-no-shirt-no-service” (79). Other signs adopt a more intimate register: “Note on the fridge: Vanilla yogurt inside. See you in the morning, girls” (10). Citations from academic or scientific texts underline the more conceptual work that has influenced the poem.
 
From this standpoint, Deepstep Come Shining belongs to a long tradition of documentary poems that appropriate different voices, texts, and other media in order to challenge the narrow identification of poetry with subjective lyric expression. Wright’s determination to create a poetic record of a particular region, for instance, aligns her with poets like William Carlos Williams – whose Paterson (1946-1963) draws from historical letters, advertisements, and geological data to capture the local history of Paterson, New Jersey – and Hilton Obenzinger, whose New York on Fire (1989) draws from newspapers, interviews, and history books to recount the many fires that have ravaged New York City since 1613. Wright’s geographic paradigm, the road trip, has its precedent in Muriel Rukeyser’s U.S. 1 (1938), a book-length poem that employs Depression-era literary and photojournalistic techniques to represent Rukeyser’s travels along East Coast highway Route 1.⁹ In particular, Deepstep Come Shining recalls the sequence of U.S. 1 titled “The Book of the Dead,” which documents a deadly industrial disaster in West Virginia via interviews, descriptions of medical photographs, letters, and hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives. Wright’s engagement with court reporting similarly invites comparison to poems like Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony (1934-1979), which uses court records to attest to various acts of violence and injustice in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
 
At the same time, however, Deepstep Come Shining seems to resist this documentary tradition by systematically obscuring and abstracting the very texts and voices it contains. Aside from Wright’s occasional use of quotation marks, all-caps, and italics to indicate citation, there are very few cues in the text that mark the beginning and end of any utterance. The relentlessly end-stopped lines obfuscate not only the difference between one speaker’s statement and another’s question, but also the variations in intonation. As a result, many utterances flatten out, and idiosyncrasies of voice and text collapse into regularities of type. At several points, the poem explicitly acknowledges the difficult task of determining intonation: “Which is pitched higher crepe or crape,” it asks (37); “Which is brighter g-r-a-y or g-r-e-y. Which is pitched higher” (77). Furthermore, the unusual juxtaposition of lines and the frequent use of non sequitur frustrate the expectation that utterances in close proximity (grouped together in a paragraph or stanza, for instance) will speak to one another. Although the poem alludes to actual conversations and narratives surrounding numerous characters who populate the text – the floating host, the boneman and the snakeman, the Veals of Deepstep, Pattycake, Clyde Connell, and Aunt Flora, for instance -, more often than not these conversations and narratives are dispersed throughout the poem in nearly irreconcilable fragments.
 
Indeed, Deepstep Come Shining alternately locates and dislocates its component parts (not to mention the reader) both temporally and spatially. The poem is clearly set in the rural South, and often mentions specific spatial coordinates: towns such as Deepstep, Milledgeville, and Vidalia; and businesses such as Motel 6, Chuck’s Dollar Store, and Scatters Pool Hall. It even offers directions: “Ripcord Lounge is up on the right. . . A little past the package store”; “Make a left just beyond Pulltight Road” (8). Yet these coordinates do not form a cohesive map; or if they do, it is a map that folds in on itself at various points. In the poem’s own words, “the genesis of direction breaks and scatters” (35). Interiors become exteriors, north leads to south, and ultimately, the promise of location turns out to be illusory. References to popular news stories about the Unabomber and the murder of Michael Jordan’s father place the reader in a general era. The more mythical temporality of the boneman and snakeman stories, however, resist being plotted on a historical timeline. Insisting that “no one should know the hour or the day” (10), the poem enacts a kind of textual “Time lapse” that disorients the reader (3, 93). Its refrain, “Now do you know where you are,” only underlines this sense of temporal and spatial disorientation (8, 22, 37, 89). In effect, the only time and space the reader can be sure of occupying is the time and space of the poem itself. The poem, from this standpoint, is not simply a second-hand transcript of what Wright has seen, but moreover a record of what she literally makes visible in poetic form.
 
The stenographs in Deepstep Come Shining further underline this project of dislocation and abstraction. Despite their nod to indexical writing, the stenographs do not transparently point to the courtroom dialogues they index. In fact, to the reader who is unfamiliar with shorthand, they seem virtually illegible. Although Wright potentially could have remedied this situation by having the stenotype transcribed into longhand, she chose not to, presenting them in facsimile instead. As a result, the formal arrangement of the stenotype contrasts sharply with the poem, and its material features, such as the darker tone of the paper and the irregularities of the ink, come to the fore. The abstraction of the actual courtroom proceedings, that is, reveals the stenographer’s mark – in this case, the mark of Alyce Collins Wright, C.D.’s mother. The stenotype facsimiles ultimately serve both as a site of documentation and as a site of abstraction. They gesture towards a trial while simultaneously obfuscating that trial to register the presence of the one person there who is meant to embody absence: the stenographer.
 
Deepstep Come Shining not only yields this dialectic of documentation and abstraction on a formal level, but also figures it thematically. If, as detailed earlier, the poem betrays an attraction to objective, mechanical vision in many passages, it also celebrates a more abstract, metaphysical kind of vision in others. Many passages ascribe greater visionary powers to people whose eyesight has been compromised in some way. “A synergism of cancer and dwelling in musical extremis” allows Coltrane, for instance, to see angels (59). An iridectomy gives way to vivid metaphor:

A shirt on the floor looked like

the mouth of a well

Spots on a horse
horrible holes in its side

The sun in the tree
green hill of crystals

Moon over Milledgeville
only a story

Saucer of light on the wall
the hand of god.

(51)

The poem’s ongoing punning between “whole” and “hole,” as well as the many references to focusing and refocusing, blurring in and blurring out, only reiterate Wright’s concern for this oscillation between vision and blindness, positive and negative space, figure and ground.

 
Wright does not regard this kind of oscillation as merely interesting, however, and instead repeatedly associates it with violence. Light must be “murdered” so “the truth [can] become apparent” (75). An almost apocalyptic version of this oscillation is figured on the last page of the poem, when the speaker vows to “offer a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning” (107). Like the devastating fire to which the speaker alludes – a fire that destroyed the very objects the text incarnates – this “once-and-for-all-thing” (presumably the poem itself) simultaneously radiates with and obliterates the objects to which it points. It is as if the poem promises to illuminate and immortalize, yet at the same time extinguish, the very objects and bodies it points to or marks. Wright, in other words, emphasizes the precarious and potentially self-destructive nature of the model of light-writing that so fascinates her.
 
Deepstep Come Shining is certainly not the first poem to abstract documentary material. On the contrary, all documentary poems, including those mentioned earlier – Williams’s Paterson, Obenzinger’s New York on Fire, Rukeyser’s U.S. 1, and Reznikoff’s Testimony – arguably demonstrate an impulse towards abstraction. After all, the very strategies poets often use to adapt documentary material to the form of poetry – selection, fragmentation, repetition, lineation, and so on – paradoxically divert attention away from the voices, places, and events being documented and towards more formal aspects of their poetry.¹⁰ Without some degree of abstraction, in fact, it would be difficult to distinguish a documentary poem from a mere mechanical exercise. Abstraction serves, in other words, as a response to the central question that, as Marjorie Perloff notes, inevitably arises for the documentary poet: “If the words used are not my own, how can I convey the true voice of feeling unique to lyric”? From this perspective, abstraction does not simply entail a lapse or distortion of the documentary impulse. Rather, it generates a crucial dialectic that allows documentary poets to negotiate their relationship to lyric.
 
The history of this dialectic of documentation and abstraction coincides, to a large extent, with the history of lyric. Although a detailed account of this history is beyond the scope of this essay, a couple of broad trends are worth sketching out. In the first half of the 20th century, documentary projects appealed to many poets as a way of counteracting the individualism of the lyric and bringing poetry closer to everyday realities. Rukeyser, for instance, gravitated towards documentary material because she believed that “the actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry” (qtd. in Dayton 226). Documentary material offered her a broader foundation on which to “build” her poems – a foundation that went beyond “those personal responses which have always been the basis for poetry” (qtd. in Dayton 146). Like other modernist poets, Rukeyser tends to use abstraction as a means of reinforcing, interrogating, commenting on, or elucidating the messages already inherent in documentary material. Later in the 20th century, however, a number of poets turned to documentary not as an alternative or supplement to lyric, but as a way of challenging the very coherence of the lyric self. In her book-length poem Dictee (1982), for instance, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha stitches together historical, autobiographical, journalistic, epistolary, and visual texts in order to complicate the idea of a Korean voice or identity. For postmodern poets like Cha, abstraction does not clarify or unify disparate materials; instead it underlines the extent to which the lyric speaker is constructed (or, more to the point, deconstructed) by disparate materials.
 
Although both of these trends inform Wright’s work, Deepstep Come Shining‘s use of abstraction sharply diverges from that of many earlier documentary poems and indeed marks a new approach to lyric. As mentioned above, Wright figures the movement from mechanical to metaphysical vision as an act of violence. This act of violence, in turn, echoes her transcription of individual voices and texts into typographic form. Abstraction, that is, does not serve as a means of deriving meaning from the voices and texts Wright collected on her road trip; on the contrary, abstraction destroys meaning by radically materializing these voices and texts to the point of impenetrability. In this light, the poem’s use of abstraction reveals the strong influence of language poetry on Wright’s work, an influence remarked by critics like Lynn Keller. As Keller points out, however, Wright draws upon strategies of language poetry to resist “the kind of personal lyric that had become the sanctioned form for feminist expression,” at the same time that, in keeping with a number of other contemporary women poets, she distances herself from the exclusive, “male-dominated Language scene” (28). This distancing is particularly apparent in her efforts to re-embody the voices and texts she so radically materializes. Just as the Arkansas court proceedings that underlie Deepstep Come Shining‘s stenotype pages ultimately bear the mark of Wright’s mother Alyce, so too the Southern voices and texts composing the poem ultimately bear the mark of C.D. The poem indexes not only the events of Wright’s road trip and the court where her mother worked, but moreover Wright and her mother’s sheer presence as witnesses.
 
It might be tempting to assume here that Deepstep Come Shining is proving a general point about the ease with which language can be appropriated or re-embodied by various subjects (a point that would largely accord with Language poetry). But there is nothing general about Wright’s decision to index herself and her mother. Indeed, by deliberately choosing to include a set of stenotype facsimiles her mother produced, Wright gestures towards a very personal relationship that motivates Deepstep Come Shining‘s poetics of vision. By aligning stenography with poetry, Wright specifically aligns her mother’s career as a court reporter with her own career as a poet. Unlike Wright’s father’s job as an Arkansas judge, which required him to evaluate testimony and intervene in the lives of those he encountered in the courtroom, Wright’s mother’s job as a court reporter barred her from evaluating or intervening in any way. Amidst the noise and activity of the courtroom, her mother would have been an essentially passive and silent presence, revealing nothing of herself as she typed. Wright, however, challenges this dichotomy between the activity of judging and the passivity of recording by attempting to salvage something meaningful from her mother’s stenotype facsimiles.¹¹ Realizing that no translation or reading of the stenotype pages will yield any insight into her mother, Wright opts instead to abstract the pages, thereby emphasizing the beauty and craft of the physical traces her mother left behind (and, by extension, of the traces she leaves behind in the poem). Abstraction, in other words, gives rise to an unexpected locus of intimacy and of lyricism in Deepstep Come Shining. If the poem’s documentary material manifests an appreciation for the Southern landscapes and soundscapes that shaped Wright’s childhood, its abstractions manifest an appreciation for the peculiar legacy of type-writing that Wright inherited from her mother.
 
Wright’s use of abstraction not only distinguishes Deepstep Come Shining from earlier documentary poetry, but also anticipates a kind of appropriative poetry that has gained popularity in the new millennium. As a number of critics have noted, many contemporary poets – among them Vanessa Place, Katie Degentesh, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Noah Eli Gordon – have recently pursued projects that involve various forms of citation and transcription. Granted, many of these projects gain inspiration from modern digital media and communication technologies that are a far cry from Deepstep Come Shining’s antiquated stenography, but they also echo the ideal of nonintervention that stenography embodies.¹² In fact, although this poetry incorporates documents and source material, I hesitate to call all of it “documentary” insofar as its commitment is not always to the events and objects to which the documents point. In some cases the documents are almost incidental to the larger project of substantiating – indeed, indexing – the poet’s encounters and interactions with them. For instance, Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day (2003), a word-for-word transcription of the September 1^st, 2000 edition of The New York Times, is less about the specific news events of that day, and more about the painstaking and tedious labor the poem required for its production. Likewise, Flarf (a genre of poetry generated by internet searches) often foregrounds the poet’s process of navigating the Web as much as the specific content generated by it. The documented voices and texts of Deepstep Come Shining, by contrast, are in no way incidental. While the poem’s lyric and documentary modes are mutually exclusive (to see one is to be blind to the other), they nevertheless converge upon a similar set of preoccupations and concerns. Wright’s poetics of vision nevertheless paves the way for the appropriative poetry of the new millennium, insofar as it shows that poets can extract something personal, even lyrical, from second-hand documents and information without having to resort to older confessional or expressive modes of writing to do so. Indeed, in light of Wright’s work, poetic projects that may have appeared to embody the culmination of anti-lyrical tendencies re-emerge as sites of renewed engagement with lyric, and, more generally speaking, of renewed commitment to the specificity of various modes of literary discourse.
 
To be sure, Wright demonstrates an intense desire to capture – and even radiate with – the voices and texts she literally encounters over the course of Deepstep Come Shining‘s composition. Abstraction, however, is just as crucial to the poem because it allows her to forego some of the more expressive conventions of lyric poetry, while at the same time advancing the poet’s role as a remarkably complex seer or poeta vates. Although many critics have examined Deepstep Come Shining‘s preoccupation with vision, by overemphasizing the poem’s documentary mode and underemphasizing its corresponding abstractions they have, not insignificantly, overlooked Wright’s efforts to formalize her own role as a visionary. On the one hand, Deepstep Come Shining‘s poet-as-seer is merely an “operator,” a technology for faithfully capturing and making visible certain sights. On the other hand, she is a dangerously blinding force. She makes the reader look away from what is most transparent in order to see what else might be revealed: “We see a little farther now and a little farther still / Peeping into the unseen” (9).
 

One Big Self’s Politics of Vision

 
On the surface, One Big Self manifests a dialectic of documentation and abstraction reminiscent of Deepstep Come Shining. A collection of voices and texts accumulated over the course of another trip through the South, One Big Self abounds with road signs, crime reports, confessions, statistics, radio broadcasts, and inmate questionnaires. Like Deepstep Come Shining, One Big Self also features a list of sources Wright researched and in many cases cites (a list titled “Why not check it out and lock it down”). In some cases, Wright directly identifies the source, speaker, and/or addressee of a given line or stanza, but in most cases the task of identification is not so straightforward.
 
Some lines imply particular speakers and addressees (prisoners, guards, the poet); some carry double meanings or vary in meaning depending on the context. As she did in Deepstep Come Shining, Wright further complicates the task of identification by often omitting crucial punctuation and thereby flattening the tonal register. As John Cotter remarks, “abstract, a lot of the lines can be read in more than one way, or read as true for more than one inmate, or an observer, or apply equally well to victim or visitor.” One Big Self also frustrates narrative expectations with its play of associative logic, non sequitur, parataxis, and circular questioning. It furthermore participates in the kind of simultaneous location and dislocation observed earlier in relation to Deepstep Come Shining. Although one section is headed “On the road to St. Gabriel” and another “On the road to Angola,” for instance, the poem most often interweaves and even collapses different times and spaces.
 
To notice similar processes of documentation and abstraction and of location and dislocation at work in both Deepstep Come Shining and One Big Self is not to say that the poems share the same overall project or agenda. To begin with, in One Big Self the document or record enters the more menacing realm of evidence, a realm where sentences potentially incriminate. Wright explicitly identifies “the resistance of poetry to the conventions of evidentiary writing” as a challenge that shaped her project; and, as the subtitle of the 2007, poem-only edition of One Big Self—One Big Self: An Investigation—announces, the poem proceeds via a gathering of evidence (ix). As R.S. Gwynn points out, however, it is not entirely clear “what’s being investigated” (685). The thing about evidence, after all, is that it implies a crime (or, at the very least, an event that requires adjudication). Yet Wright makes it clear that she does not want to criminalize or determine anything, even though (or perhaps because) her subjects’ guilt has been, in some cases, predetermined. She lays out her aims in the preface: “Not to idealize, not to judge, not to exonerate, not to aestheticize immeasurable levels of pain. Not to demonize, not anathematize. What I wanted was to unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time” (xiv).
 
Indeed, lacking a definite criminal event, the poem often investigates its own composition, with all the prison visits, correspondences, and research that went into it. The relative amorphousness of this event, in turn, leads Wright to continually interrogate – and push the boundaries of – what exactly counts as evidence. “Counting” thus serves as a crucial term in One Big Self. “Count your fingers / Count your toes / Count your nose holes / Count your blessings…” the poem begins, establishing counting as a device that will return again and again (3). The poem is nevertheless by no means all inclusive, and it acknowledges many more impasses than Deepstep Come Shining does. In some cases a voice warns “Don’t ask,” or a speaker notes “I don’t go there,” as if some lines of investigation are too loaded. In other cases the poet resorts to more impersonal forms of research such as the search engine “Ask Jeeves.” The poem, in sum, betrays an unusually agonized relationship to its own contents – to what it will or will not allow in – that contrasts with Deepstep Come Shining‘s sense of ease (Wright describes the latter poem as her “rapture” (“Looking”).
 
Perhaps it should come as no surprise to find this level of self-consciousness in a poem titled One Big Self. The project, after all, demands that Wright consider the very nature of “selves,” and not just her own, but also the prisoners’. As she explains in her preface to One Big Self, her objective was to view “prisoners, among others, as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves” (xiv). Deborah Luster’s preface to the collaborative photo-book edition, titled “The Reappearance of Those Who Have Gone,” similarly stresses the prisoners’ disclosures of their “very own selves… before my camera.”¹³ Both editions of One Big Self demonstrate not only an awareness of the problem of how to get other “selves” into the poem (i.e., not as “others” in relation to Wright’s and Luster’s selves), but moreover a level of circumspection about what constitutes a “self” in the first place. Consider, for instance, the inmates’ attire in Luster’s photo-book portraits. Some pose in prison stripes, others in chef hats and uniforms; some wear Mardi Gras beads and feathers, others, grisly Halloween costumes. Are these really the subjects’ “very own selves”? Does the fact that the inmates choose how to dress and pose themselves necessarily ensure that their “very own selves” are being presented? More to the point, what does that phrase even mean?
 
The question of how to capture a subject’s true self has been central to the practice of portrait photography – and of portraiture more generally – for years. As Michael Fried points out in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, there is something inherently theatrical about portraiture, about the idea of a subject posing for an artist. And if the artist’s ambition is to capture the subject’s true self, and not a false performance, there is something consequently problematic about portraiture. (Here again, the difference between documenting and evidencing comes into play: all photographic portraits in some sense document their subjects; but only the select few succeed in evidencing their subjects’ true selves.) Some photographers have attempted to sidestep the portrait’s theatricality by experimenting with hidden cameras and candid shots, but these experiments often entail forms of manipulation and intervention in their own right. Fried thus maintains that for portrait photography to be genuinely anti-theatrical it must not avoid, but must directly contend with the frontal pose.
 
This question of how to capture a subject’s true self even when that subject is posing under the most theatrical conditions is clearly a question that Luster, as a portrait photographer, has not only inherited, but moreover embraced. While her portraits may seem strikingly theatrical, they also evidence an anti-theatrical impulse. More to the point, they risk theatricality precisely in order to earn a kind of anti-theatricality. Luster’s anti-theatrical impulse is perhaps most obvious in her comments about wanting to be as unobtrusive a photographer as possible. She claims, for instance, that she did not conduct research on prison life as part of the project. In “The Reappearance of Those Who Have Gone,” she implies that research would have interfered with her ability to make the portraits “as direct a telling as possible.” Clearly, Luster’s methods of documenting selves contrast sharply with Wright’s methods. The assumption here seems to be that photography, by its very nature, neutrally captures its subject (in this case, the prisoners) – and that whatever Luster learned about prison life could have distorted the subjects’ disclosures of their “very own selves… before my camera.” Wright, by contrast, had to immerse herself in research to get other “selves” into her poetry to begin with.
 
Luster’s decision to print her photographic portraits on sheets of metal, in the style of tintypes, also underlines her anti-theatrical impulse. As Michael Carlebach observes, tintypes are known for resisting some of the formalities associated with traditional portraiture. When they were first introduced in 1856, tintypes were cheap, durable, and – compared to daguerreotypes and other early processes – relatively fast and easy to print. This made them popular not only with studio photographers who wanted to make a quick profit from working-class customers, but also with itinerant photographers who worked concessions at carnivals and fairs. It also made them unpopular with photographers who hoped to elevate photography to an elite profession or art form.
 
Tintypists tended to prioritize business concerns over aesthetic concerns. They used plain backdrops and did not deem it cost-effective to outfit their studios with elaborate props or sets. In fact, one of the only props many tintypists did use was a clamp (sometimes called a “head rest”) to immobilize the subjects’ heads and thereby prevent blurring. While these clamps contributed to stiff, unnatural poses, these poses stem from a technological rather than an aesthetic formality. The subjects appear stiff, in other words, not because they are trying to perform certain formalities associated with portraiture, but because they are simply trying to prevent the shots from being ruined.
 
This is not to say that the subjects were oblivious to aesthetic concerns. On the contrary, tintypists’ relative indifference to the aesthetics of their work enabled subjects to take more active roles in the composition of their portraits. Subjects often chose how to pose, where to look, what expressions to have, and what to wear. Many brought personal props to the shoots. During the Civil War, in fact, when tintype trade flourished, many soldiers posed in uniform with weapons, and this fashion of posing with the tools of one’s trade then continued after the war. What was different about the conventions associated with tintypes, however, is that they were developed and perpetuated to appeal not to professional magazines or artists, but to subjects’ friends, coworkers, and family members.
 
This history of more informal tintype portraiture has appealed to a number of contemporary portrait photographers who use tintype to document and in many cases dignify individuals from more or less marginal social groups: cowboys in Robb Kendrick’s “Revealing Character” (2005), for instance, or soldiers in Ellen Susan’s “Soldier Portraits” (2007-2010). Luster’s photographs – and her determination to give inmates control of their own images – clearly gesture towards this history too. Notwithstanding the occasional prison stripe, however, the costumes, masks, and occupational props wielded by Luster’s subjects do not divulge – and often conceal – their identity as prisoners. In fact, Luster’s photographs manage to give even the prison stripes a costumey feel. And unlike a number of other prison photography projects such as Danny Lyon’s “Conversations with the Dead” (1971) and Taro Yamasaki’s “Inside Jackson Prison” (1980), which offer glimpses of penitentiary life, most of Luster’s photographs employ black backdrops that block out the broader prison environment and allow the inmates themselves to take center stage.
 
Luster’s portraits, in other words, do not overdetermine her subjects’ identities as prisoners. On the contrary, they enable her subjects to express a wide range of identities and aspirations, some of which seem deeply sincere, others deeply ironic, and others so fantastical that they are difficult to reconcile with the realities prison life. Inmates who participated in One Big Self understood that they would both appear in a photo book and get a dozen wallet-sized prints for themselves. The inmates’ poses thus express a variety of intentions: to generate sympathy from estranged relatives, develop a portfolio, become famous, add to their possessions, and communicate with loved ones. So although the resulting photos resist the formalities of the mugshot (the quintessential prison photograph) and of photographs once used by eugenicists to diagnose criminals, they are highly formalized in their own way. Luster’s photographs do not ultimately solve the problem of how to overcome theatricality, and thus capture the inmates’ “true selves” or individuality; but in the process of attempting to solve this problem, they also redirect the viewer’s attention onto competing forms of portraiture that, for better or worse, condition subjects’ social legibility. They clearly suggest that their subjects are more than anonymous prisoners; but the viewer’s search for particulars leads only to a host of abstractions – of performed “types.”
 
The two cover photographs selected for the poem-only edition of One Big Self suggest that Wright may be just as interested as Luster (if not more interested) in the problems of self-expression that portraiture raises. The majority of Luster’s portraits show subjects directly facing the camera in theatrical poses and clothing that, as suggested above, frequently pastiche conventional portrait photography. The two cover photographs in the poem-only edition, however, present an even more tenuous notion of facingness. The front cover depicts a woman wearing a dark mask over her eyes, a tall light-colored hat, and a baggy Halloween costume with bells on the collar and wrists. Her hands rest on her lap as she stares directly into the camera, unsmiling. The back cover shows an arm extended, palm facing the camera, bearing a tattoo of a woman’s face. What is remarkable about both of these cover photographs is that they exemplify the tension between being “all there” in a portrait, and yet not quite all there. The presence of the mask and the tattoo suggest exhibitionism, on the one hand, and a kind of concealment or holding back, on the other.
 
Like the women in the cover portraits, Wright expresses a desire at once to exhibit and to conceal what she has evidenced in One Big Self. This desire recalls the dialectic of documentation and abstraction explored earlier in the context of both Deepstep Come Shining and One Big Self. But whereas Deepstep Come Shining obscures actual court proceedings with an embodied (and deeply personal) stenotype, One Big Self obscures the actual bodies of those who have been “sentenced” in order to bring to the fore various formalities, especially those of the criminal justice system. One Big Self‘s abstractions do not shift our gaze onto type-writing per se (as in Deepstep Come Shining), but rather onto the “types” portrayed – and in some cases enforced – by the prison-industrial complex and other institutions. One Big Self documents very specific utterances while paradoxically inviting us to ask what “types” of people these utterances imply: inmate, victim, or visitor. Whereas the “Stimulants, Poultices, Goads” list at the back of Deepstep Come Shining stokes (and frustrates) a desire to see what the poet saw, One Big Self‘s “Why not check it out and lock it down” more pointedly invites (and renders futile) a kind of matching game with the poem’s constitutive parts (65, 83).
 
Considering these typological leanings, it is not surprising that One Big Self pays significant attention to forms of address. The poem’s pseudo-letters, with salutations like “Dear Child of God,” “Dear Prisoner,” and “Dear Affluent Reader,” for instance, highlight the roles that people assume in the process of writing to one another. According to Martin Earl, “The repeated letters enable the poet … to stress one of the remaining formalities left to people living in the alternative world of incarceration. Language, after all, is the one thing that can’t be taken away from them.” But rather than treating letters as rare formalities permitted in prison, Wright treats them as sites where some of the many formalities of prison life – and of life beyond prison – get articulated. She does not depict the letters as a unique privilege, like Earl suggests, insofar as they absolutely do not enable prisoners to freely express themselves. Instead, the letters raise problems similar to those examined earlier with respect to portraiture: how can writers reveal their true selves when the relationships between writers, texts, and readers are so fraught?
 
Wright’s formal interest in the transformation of individuals into types also expresses itself via the content of the poem, which frequently notes the idiosyncrasies of bodies, in particular tattoos and scars. It plays with the notion that a face is something you earn in prison, that inmates eventually “get a face on them” (23). At the same time, the poem attends to the generalities into which faces or people can disappear. For example, “Black is the Color” broaches discrimination within society and/or the criminal justice system, as does the recurring question of whether people “run to type” (17). The poem underscores the many, more trivial ways people are typed too: one can be “a budget person,” for instance, or “a night person,” a sign of the zodiac, or an administrative number (67). Quotes from a board game called “The Mansion of Happiness” further accentuate the ease with which individuals can be classified, evaluated, and rewarded (or punished) according to arbitrary rules. Even the title One Big Self alludes to the relationship between individual and type; as the quote of film director Terence Malick elaborates, “Maybe all men got one big soul where everybody’s a part of – all faces of the same man: one big self” (qtd. in Gilbert).
 
By reframing the dialectic of documentation and abstraction established in Deepstep Come Shining in terms of individual and type, One Big Self manages to adapt Wright’s poetics to a corresponding politics. A couple of examples from the poem are useful here. Consider, first, the campaign to “Restore the Night Sky” by reducing the light pollution caused by surrounding prisons (27). The image establishes a basic conflict between two levels of vision: earthly lights obscure celestial ones. On another level, however, this conflict is loaded with sociological significance: some people can’t enjoy clear views of the sky because the state is keeping its eye on prisoners. This example, in other words, exposes the fact that some types of people have (or at least believe they ought to have) access to various sights, while others don’t – and, conversely, that some types of people get subjected to surveillance, while others don’t. Wright also uses mirrors in One Big Self to elaborate a similar politics of vision. She explains, “Your only mirror [in prison] is one of stainless steel. The image it affords will not tell whether you are young still or even real” (38). Once again, the poem not only acknowledges two competing levels of vision (i.e., the literal substance of the mirror, on the one hand, and the fleeting images of inmates who appear in it, on the other), but moreover implicates the mirror in a broader system of isolation and control. Chosen above all for its durability, the prison mirror ultimately serves to detemporalize and dematerialize, rather than individuate, the inmates who approach it.
 
On the one hand, Wright wants to imagine that she and Luster might remedy this situation by improving the inmates’ access to clear images of themselves. She explains that many inmates agreed to have their pictures taken because they were eager to get copies of the prints, to see themselves better than the regulation mirrors allowed. Here the distinction between self-expression and self-reflection breaks down: the photographs function not as sites where inmates reveal their true selves to others, but rather as sites where they become conscious of themselves as such for the first time in potentially years. The photographs allow inmates to read the otherwise elusive passage of time on their own faces and to verify the reality of their own bodies against a dozen wallet-sized prints. On the other hand, Wright seems quite aware that Luster’s photographs are just as entrenched in a politics of vision as any other set of images. Taken as a whole, the tens of thousands of photographs Luster took of Louisiana prisoners merge into patterns and generalities. In particular, they present an overwhelmingly racialized image of prison: a large majority of Louisiana prisoners are black. As the poem confirms, “Black is the Color” “Of 77% of the inmates in Angola,” and “Of 66% of the inmates at St. Gabriel” (34). Luster’s tintype-style photographs, which have an antique look to them, further underline the historical significance of these statistics. They show that despite the time that has elapsed since the Civil War, when tintypes reached the height of their popularity, the status of African Americans still looks bleak by some measures.¹⁴
 
While many other critics have noticed a politics of vision in One Big Self, they have frequently misconstrued it. The primary mistake they have made resembles the one mentioned earlier in the context of Deepstep Come Shining criticism. By concentrating on the presence of documentary subject matter, they have concluded that Wright’s poetry and Luster’s photographs are mainly about allowing outsider voices to speak and be seen. Nadia Herman Colburn, for instance, insists that Wright’s poems show a “commitment to understanding other people.” “To read her poems,” Colburn observes, “is to enter into the lived experience, not only of Wright herself, but of her characters.” According to Suzanne Wise, “what dominates Wright’s account are the voices of the prisoners themselves, shifting power away from the poet-witness as the arbiter of experiences” (405). Grace Glueck claims that by “patiently” shooting inmates “in a neutral way,” Luster “honors their identities” (29). And Stephen Burt goes so far as to claim that “for Wright and Luster, the project of portrait photography… becomes a project of releasing people from bondage” (50).
 
These claims tend to rely on the assumption that there is something liberating about expressing oneself and, in turn, being seen or heard. This assumption is, of course, a popular one. It motivates a broad range of creative projects that aim to provide spaces of expression behind prison walls and/or to share the work of incarcerated writers and artists with a broader audience.¹⁵ What is not clear, however, is that Wright and Luster share this assumption. By no means did they enter the prisons they visited as activists, educators, or publicists. (On more than one occasion, Wright has acknowledged the ethical precariousness of these visits.) Neither the questionnaires Wright distributed to prisoners as part of her research nor the photographs Luster took were meant to be outlets of creative expression for the inmates. And although Wright and Luster did discover that some inmates appreciated the opportunity to pose for the camera and share their stories, the images and text of One Big Self depict as many—if not more—moments of foreclosure as moments of disclosure. The poem in particular deploys a kind of abstraction that violently wrenches readers from lived experience and locates them in a formal space. Like the two cover photographs for the poem-only edition of One Big Self, it simultaneously solicits and forbids the viewer’s identification with its subjects. On one level, the poem aims at an anti-theatrical ideal: readers, Wright hopes, will see the prisoners for who they are, without the distortion of various lenses. On another level, the poem foregrounds these lenses themselves.
 
Abstraction allows One Big Self to generate some skepticism about the assumption that expressing oneself, and being seen and heard, is in itself liberating. As mentioned earlier, the poem’s exploration of forms of address, for instance, implies that “free” expression or communication is an impossible ideal. Moreover, by abstracting individual voices into types, the poem asks us to consider the many other forms of subjugation and inequality that exist—some serious, some trivial. It reminds us that no matter how liberating it may be for prisoners to be heard and respected, respect and attention will not release them from prison; no matter what kind of windows One Big Self might open, the walls that separate prisoners from the rest of society remain very real. In fact the one identity category that encompasses all the subjects portrayed in One Big Self—the category of prisoner—never really has to be acknowledged, performed, or represented there, because no matter what they say or how they look, the subjects are admitted to One Big Self only insofar as they are prisoners. If there is no escaping the prison literally, there is no escaping it figuratively (i.e., via One Big Self) either. This, again, is why the prison stripes worn by some of the subjects in Luster’s portraits seem almost incidental. Granted, Wright’s preface acknowledges the lofty-sounding ambition to reunite “the separated with the larger human enterprise” (xiv). If the poem stages a reunion, however, it is decidedly not a reunion where individual people freely honor, sympathize with, or refine their views of each other. Rather, it is a reunion that exposes the existing social and political forms that contain people.
 
In this light, Wright and Luster’s efforts to avoid criminalizing anyone are particularly significant. They show that Wright and Luster are less interested in what people have done in the past, and more interested in the social and political forms that condition what they can and cannot do in the present. The questions their project raises are not about who deserves to be criminalized – or who deserves to be “typed” in any way, for that matter – but rather about what function certain categories and formalities serve in the first place. Is it possible that some “types” precede – and indeed even produce – the individuals who exemplify them? Is it possible, in other words, that being a criminal type is not wholly a matter of personal responsibility? Do the social and political forms we perpetuate bear some responsibility as well?
 
Although few may admit it, the prison itself is a form that many people have a stake in maintaining. Wright claims that One Big Self originated from one troubling observation – that prison was the central industry of certain areas of Louisiana. And in sections like “Dialing Dungeons for Dollars,” she interrogates privatization, prison realty, and the corporate revenue it generates (28). Admittedly, One Big Self is not exactly a polemic against the prison-industrial complex, and Wright’s point is not to offer concrete alternatives to current social and political formations. By periodically blinding our view of individuals, however, she succeeds in illuminating the formal sites where social and political change may occur. These sites, like the prisons Wright and Luster visited, may be places where our vision often falters, and where we cannot properly or fairly see the individuals contained. Still, Wright implies, there is a limit to how far better vision alone will get us. After all, as important as it may be to see individuals for their “true selves,” if we want to interrogate a form like the prison as such – and not just who deserves to be in it or how they are regarded once they are there – we must overlook these selves for the sake of the system of which we are all a part.
 

Jennie Berner is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she teaches English and fiction writing. Both her scholarly work and her creative dissertation – a collection of short stories – interrogate the relationship between literature and visual technologies. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Crazyhorse, Boston Review, The Journal, and The Coachella Review.
 

Footnotes

Works Cited

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• Burt, Stephen. “Lightsource, Aperture, Face: C.D. Wright and Photography.” Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2009. 41-59. Print.
• Carlebach, Michael L. Working Stiffs: Occupational Portraits in the Age of Tintypes. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. Print.
• Colburn, Nadia Herman. “About C.D. Wright: A Profile.” Ploughshares. Emerson College, n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2012.
• Cotter, John. “The Damage Collector.” Open Letters Monthly. Open Letters LLC, n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2012.
• Dayton, Tim. “Lyric and Document in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead.” Journal of Modern Literature 21.2 (1997/98): 223-240. Print.
• Earl, Martin. “One Big Self: Finding the Noble Vernacular: C.D. Wright/Deborah Luster” Harriet the Blog. The Poetry Foundation, 2 Apr. 2009. Web. 30 Nov. 2012.
• Fried, Michael. Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. New Haven: Yale UP, 2008. Print.
• Gilbert, Alan. “Neither Settled Nor Easy.” Boston Review Jan.-Feb. 2008. Web. 30 Nov. 2012.
• Glueck, Grace. “Deborah Luster and C.D. Wright – ‘One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana.'” The New York Times. 18 Jun. 2004. Print. 29.
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• Keller, Lynn. Thinking Poetry: Readings in Contemporary Women’s Exploratory Poetics. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2010. Print.
• Krauss, Rosalind. “Notes on the Index.” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. 196-220. Print.
• Luster, Deborah, and C.D. Wright. One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2003. Print.
• Luster, Deborah. “The Reappearance of Those Who Have Gone.” Introduction. One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. Twin Palms Publishers, 2003. Deborah Luster. Web. 12 Dec. 2012.
• Perloff, Marjorie. “Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric.” Boston Review. May/June 2012. Web. 12 Dec. 2012.
• “Prisons, Activism, and the Academy – a Roundtable with Buzz Alexander, Bell Gale Chevigny, Stephen John Hartnett, Janie Paul, and Judith Tannenbaum.” Editor’s Column. PMLA 123.3 (May 2008): 545-567. Print.
• Reed, Brian M. “In Other Words: Postmillennial Poetry and Redirected Language.” Contemporary Literature 52.4 (2011): 756-790. Web.
• Wise, Susan. “The Border-Crossing Relational Poetry of C.D. Wright.” Eleven More Women Poets in the 21st Century. Ed. Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2012. 399-425. Print.
• Wright, C.D. Just Whistle: A Valentine. Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 1993. Print.
• ———. Deepstep Come Shining. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 1998. Print.
• ———. “Looking for ‘One Untranslatable Song.'” Interview with Kent Johnson. Jacket 15 (Dec. 2001). Web. 12 Dec. 2012.
• ———. One Big Self: An Investigation. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2007. Print.
• ———. “The Wolf Interview: C.D. Wright.” Interview with Lynn Keller. The Wolf 19 (2008). Bloodaxe Blogs. 20 Apr. 2009. Web. 12 Dec. 2012.